POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Today’s Health Care Round Up

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m doing well, thank you. You call this the collapse of health care reform. But, you see this now, united Republican opposition. The President's poll numbers at new lows. And a lot of leading Democrats believe that if this bill goes down, it will cripple the Obama presidency. Are you prepared to do that?

DEAN: Of course not. That's one of the problems. We've gotten to the stage, George, and you know this better than most, in Washington, where passing any bill is a victory. And that's the problem. Decisions are being made about the long-term future of this country for short-term political reasons. And that's never a good sign. There are some good things in this bill. The problem is, we're now committed to a solution using the private insurance companies. And you will be forced to buy insurance. If you don't, you'll pay a fine. And 27 percent of the money that you put in will not go to your health care. It will go to CEOs, who make $20 million a year. This is a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG. And not one person- excuse me- a very small number of people will get any insurance at all until 2014, if the bill works.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But- Well, excuse me. The President says this is going to cover about 30 million Americans. And a lot of your fellow progressives and liberals are onboard. Listen to Senator Tom Harkin.

SENATOR TOM HARKIN (D-Iowa): I plead with all of my progressive friends, now is the time to get over this hurdle. If this bill, Rachel, were so bad, why are 40 Republicans on the hill going after it day after day after day and trying to kill it?

Hahahahahahahaaaaaaaa . . .

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“The fact is that benefits kick in on day one and the large majority of benefits kick in on day one,” [Franken] shouted.

But in reality, the overwhelming bulk of the spending in the new health care bill comes by expanding Medicaid and offering subsidies to individuals to purchase insurance on the new government exchanges, and those changes don’t go into effect until year five (or 2014).

The Congressional Budget Office found that just $9 billion of the $848 billion total spending aimed at expanding coverage from 2010 to 2019 would occur in the first four years, while the remaining $839 billion wouldn’t come until the last six. In percentage terms, a whopping 1 percent of spending would occur from 2010 to 2014. This was one of the accounting gimmicks that Democrats used to make the legislation appear cheaper over their 10-year budget window.

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The Medical Loss Ratios memo is the smoking gun. It shows that indeed, Democrats have been submitting proposals to the CBO behind closed doors and tailoring their private-sector mandates to avoid having those costs appear in the federal budget. Proposals that would result in a complete cost estimate — such as the proposal by Sen. Rockefeller discussed in the Medical Loss Ratios memo — are dropped. Because we can’t let the public see how much this thing really costs.

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding. But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation. It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail.

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Some delicious schadenfreude from Greenwald(s).

And hide the decline.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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